i still read the watch-
tower, wondering whether
or not i can do much more than
sound out floundering symbols,
splashes, crashes, cracks
and cataracts slackening
into a cold-sored spigot—my
eyes just split
this street light hiding in
haloed leaves in two, no
more than an atom split in-
to how many broken o-
konomiyaki parlors, honeycombed
over some station once Hidenori’d
noted, grown among swollen and
golden Hiroshima’s fringes pea-
fowl fanned and dancing then
where the ken’s uncreased. I’m
sorry to speak in but throbbing thumbs
and the elephant bandstands bandying break-
neck leaves just under but welted impressions a
coffee table’s kinked in the unkempt carpet.
Carpet carries more memories maybe than
you or I or the eye or the elephant wrestling
hobbling heat still smudging the space
where the street lamp laid its head once,
playing at inkblot ostrich, broken ka-
bocha pip, atom incensed into
throttling godling, some
smug smudge on the tile that anyone
dare might pose or intone or
transpose to be more than
merely molten rock
seized up into something
seemingly swept up
nearly sincerely as
somebody pestling tongue-
rolled sun beams under the runners a
drawer or a spindly jawbone,
playing at pigeonhole,
swallows as
much as the
shipshape ship of
stripped theseus might
as well swallow the wallowing,
wheezing, breathing, seething
sea
that hollows the white of what
blackstrap rorschach
most of us draw
in shellacking molasses
